Stopping the Horror of 'Reply All'

theodp writes "The WSJ's Elizabeth Bernstein reports that Reply All is still the button everyone loves to hate. 'This shouldn't still be happening,' Bernstein says of those heart-stopping moments (YouTube) when one realizes that he or she's hit 'reply all' and fired off a rant for all to see. 'After almost two decades of constant, grinding email use, we should all be too tech-savvy to keep making the same mortifying mistake, too careful to keep putting our relationships and careers on the line because of sloppiness.' Vendors have made some attempts to stop people from shooting themselves in the foot and perhaps even starting a Reply All email storm. Outlook allows users to elect to get a warning if they try to email to more than 50 people. Gmail offers an Undo Send button, which can be enabled by setting a delay in your out-bound emails, from 5-30 seconds, after which you're SOL. And AOL is considering showing faces, rather than just names, in the To field in a new email product. 'I wonder if the Reply All problem would occur if you saw 100 faces in the email,' AOL's Bill Wetherell says."

Comments

Tales of old.

[suso]

That's a nice email storm infographic they have. One time back in the 90s at Indiana University when people were mostly still using pine, a secretary at the College of Arts and Sciences sent out an email to several thousand students and put all their addresses in the two line. The headers themselves were a megabyte alone and it took a minute to open the message. Several people started replying to all and asking to be removed. It culminated with UCS terminating the mail in the queues and inboxes and suspending several user accounts. One guy replied saying something like "I just wanted everyone to know that Jim Smith takes it in the rear".

Re:Tales of old.

[Whatsisname]

People would occasionally do that in my University classes of several hundred. I couldn't resist a reply-all with a simple "what", or better yet, "hey josh, what did you get for problem 7", then the ensuing storm of people reply-all messages saying not to do that, etc.

I love reply-all, I have gmail setup to use it by default. In my opinion it's a lot easier to avoid accidentally sending messages to everyone if your default behavior is to reply to everyone.

Re:Tales of old.

[ByOhTek]

I like the solution in K-9 Mail (android app) better.

The on screen menu has 'reply', you actually have to tap another button to get to 'reply-all'. It can be tedious, but it has prevented the reply-all issues in my case.

Re:Tales of old.

[MozeeToby]

Occasionally someone at my place of business somehow manages to send an email out to everyone in the department, or division, or even the whole company. Even on modern hardware the network will struggle if you send an email out to several hundreds or even thousands of recipients. But that wouldn't be so bad, what really finishes off the network are the several dozen people who feel the need to Reply All just to say "please remove me from this email last". Of course, after a dozen or so of those go out, you end up with two or three people sending a Reply All just to say "please stop sending your removal requests Reply All" The last one went out to 500 employees and I ended up with 40+ copies of the email in my inbox because of people being absolutely stupid.

Re:Tales of old.

[ByOhTek]

damnit. That was supposed to go to Whatsisname, not all of Slashdot!

Re:Tales of old.

[chameleon3]

agreed. I use 'reply all' every time, mostly because it's imperative to not leave people out of important emails. If my boss was CCed on an email to me, say, if I don't CC him on the reply, it looks like I'm avoiding him or didn't want him to have this information.

Re:Tales of old.

[MrMarket]

What?

Re:Tales of old.

[hobarrera]

The solution is making people pay attention where they click, not "hiding buttons because users can't read", that same though is making popular software crappier every day.

Re:Tales of old.

[hobarrera]

Aside from what you stated, there's also that fact that if you Boss was CCed, NOT replying to all, would mean deliberately "kicking" him from the conversation. People should have common sense "does everyone need to know my response?" It's as simple as that.

Re:Tales of old.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

You need to understand that mistakes can and do happen, and it's a very simple UI fix to prevent. As reply-all is something that should only rarely be used, it shouldn't be as easy to click as the single reply button, something that is probably used 99% of the time instead of reply-all, that's simply poor user interface design to do so. There is no need to have one rarely needed button with possibly serious consequences directly adjacent to the more benign button that most people intend to click anyway.

Re:Tales of old.

[tigre]

That was a "Reply" vs. "Reply All" joke.

Whoosh.

Re:Tales of old.

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Woosh.

Re:Tales of old.

[Deekin_Scalesinger]

Wooooshhhh......

Re:Tales of old.

[eldepeche]

There is not one solution. Some people pay attention to everything and want a ton of tiny targets so that every task can be accomplished in one click. Other people want the 3 most common tasks instantly available, and the rest hidden behind a contextual menu so that deviation from routine forces a moment of thought before acting, decreasing the likelihood of making a mistake. Neither of those perspectives is wrong.

Re:Tales of old.

[bemymonkey]

So was "What?" ;)

Re:Tales of old.

[war4peace]

Unsubscribe; stop;

Re:Tales of old.

[Eevee]

As reply-all is something that should only rarely be used

There's a difference between "should only rarely be used" and "I rarely use." Just because it's not part of your way of doing business doesn't make it wrong. I find reply all essential for keeping a team of people together, particularly when there needs to be coordination of tasks.

The real problem is people don't use BCC more for mass distributions. If you don't have the addresses, you can't spam them back with a reply all.

Re:Tales of old.

[digitig]

Yes, and the button in an aircraft cockpit to fire a missile shouldn't have a little red flap over it, because the users should be looking at what buttons they press. Er...

Re:Tales of old.

[peragrin]

In my business it is often for the various layers to request quotes for parts. From the customer to the manufacturer there can be 3-6 different people involved. Most of them don't know what bcc, or reply to all are let alone how to use them.

Or even customers requesting a quote from various suppliers. Most often one name is in the TO: field while the rest are BCC:(if they know how to use it, or CC: if they don't)

while techies know the difference, I can't tell you how many times I have given a simple email lesson to my customers so that such things don't happen. They aren't all old people either some are 20-22 years old.

Re:Tales of old.

[Anonymous Coward]

One company I worked for recently went so far as to forcibly remove the reply-all button from Outlook via a policy push. Unfortunately, it was not the brilliant solution they had hoped for. Seems there are many legitimate uses for reply-all. (big surprize) Took a few days for knowledge of workarounds via hot keys and such to make it's way through the organisation. Those of us not using Outlook due to our choice of OS just sat back and watched.

Bottom line - Reply-all is a power tool. Like most power tools, if you use it without paying attention, you will get hurt.

Re:Tales of old.

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too!

Re:Tales of old.

[anyGould]

My favorite reply-to-all story (which is 100% true; I was there, I participated, and I got in trouble for it at the end).

My high school had just got "email" (in the "you can email your teacher and other students" sense - they didn't trust us with outside links, or didn't trust the outside with us, one or the other). First Class, if you know the software. A few interesting facts:

• You could see everyone who was online at the moment (and select the name(s) to send them an email).
• When you recieved email, it made a nice loud "ping" (and since everything was internal, it was near instant from "send" to "ping").
• From one of the walkways (that had computers for homework-use), you had a clear view/hearing to three different labs. (Just a quirk of the layout).
• This was '94, and the first experience most of these kids had with email.

Combine these facts, and you can mess with an entire school at once:

1. Pull up the list of everyone online, select all, send an email saying "Hi!"

2. Listen to the near-synchronous "ping" sound from three labs as they all receive the email.

3. Wait about ten seconds - at least two people will hit reply-all and say "who is this?" or similar.

4. Listen to a double-dose of "pings".

Wash, rinse, repeat - our best day we managed to have a continual storm of pings as emails whizzed back and forth. It only stopped when they sent teachers to the labs to instruct everyone to hit delete and leave it. (Which lead to getting in trouble part - although I think we got in more trouble for bogging the server down than for disrupting three classes *shrug*.)

The only better story I have is using Waterloo MacJanet's inability to delete a message without opening it first, combined with the ability to use alias to send an email to the same guy twenty times (as in, I hit send once, he gets twenty copies), to completely bury a friend's email account.

Re:Tales of old.

[EvanED]

As reply-all is something that should only rarely be used...

"I don't use it" doesn't mean "other people don't use it". I'd actually say that half the emails I send are reply all.

Re:Tales of old.

[SBrach]

Please remove me from this distribution list.

Re:Tales of old.

[Anonymous Coward]

My fave was someone at Merrill Lynch had somehow reply-all'd "Please, tell me more!" to a spam email for penis enlargement pills that was sent to the company-wide distribution list...

Remember, kids, Billy Kwan says, "lock your computer when you leave it!"....

Re:Tales of old.

[hawguy]

As reply-all is something that should only rarely be used...

"I don't use it" doesn't mean "other people don't use it". I'd actually say that half the emails I send are reply all.

Agreed, I make regular use of reply-all - great for keeping everyone on the team in the loop, especially when they are traveling and don't have regular access to the Sharepoint (yuck) team site.

Anytime I send something and I want to be careful that only one recipient gets it, I always use forward, that way I'm less likely to make the reply-all mistake.

Has worked for me so far and I don't have to hide the reply-all button.

Re:Tales of old.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why Mailing Lists were invented - so you only get mail when you subscribe to it. And you always effectively do a Reply-All, but it's also all nicely organized.

Having a huge To: is a freakin fail.

PS. It is the To: line, now the two line.

Re:Tales of old.

[Anonymous Coward]

This frequently happened at my company right around the time the Internet bubble burst. I was convinced the company actually started them in order to populate the 'these employees are too stupid to be working for us' list.

Re:Tales of old.

[thegarbz]

That's still nice an confined. I work for a multi-national article and the reply to all was to a spammer who somehow managed to send something to the Citrix users mailing list, pretty much everyone in the company. Naturally someone hit reply to all saying "I don't speak Russian" we had an email trail that ran for about a week including 80000 users (the timezone differences didn't help as when the Americans woke up it started anew) all saying "please remove me from your list".

It only stopped after several days when IT shut down the citrix group account.

Re:Tales of old.

[trevc]

That's a nice email storm infographic they have. One time back in the 90s at Indiana University when people were mostly still using pine, a secretary at the College of Arts and Sciences sent out an email to several thousand students and put all their addresses in the two line. The headers themselves were a megabyte alone and it took a minute to open the message. Several people started replying to all and asking to be removed. It culminated with UCS terminating the mail in the queues and inboxes and suspending several user accounts. One guy replied saying something like "I just wanted everyone to know that Jim Smith takes it in the rear".

So you went to University but still don't know the difference between two and to? The wonders of the US education system.

Re:Tales of old.

[Slashdot Parent]

The solution is making people pay attention where they click, not "hiding buttons because users can't read", that same though is making popular software crappier every day.

K-9 is an Android (i.e. cellphone) app.

There's only but so much room for buttons on the small screen, so some typical buttons need to be moved to a menu. Reply To All is as good a choice as any, but I think this might actually be configurable.

Re:Tales of old.

[Cinder6]

Reminds me of when I was in high school. Net send--it was enabled. We were taking a final in the computer lab, and I finished early and discovered this. So, I did the only responsible thing and spoofed my name, did a 'net send *' with instructions on how to use it, and watched the mayhem ensue. Turns out the broadcasts were actually being sent campus-wide.

I didn't get in trouble, but they obviously shut down net send later that day. Two years later, teachers were still telling the story.

Re:Tales of old.

[tlhIngan]

Microsoft has one too that basically crippled their email for a few days - Bedlam DL3 they call it.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/04/08/109626.aspx

It didn't help that Exchange had a bug in it that made things even worse.

Re:Tales of old.

[Kjella]

I very often need to have 2-3 people in the loop in addition to myself, I use "Reply to all" all the time. The problem is when you are on a huge mailing list like "Everyone in the company" and people use reply to all.

I just realized the simple solution, which doesn't require rewriting any email applications. Simply require a confirmation, like when you sign up for anything. If you take a "Reply to all" on the list, it won't actually get sent to the list. Instead you get a mail back that "This mailing list goes to [count] people. Please do not send unsubscription requests to the whole list, contact the list administrator. If you are really sure this is what you want, reply to this mail with CONFIRM in the subject." That would solve 99% of the problem.

Re:Tales of old.

[Slashdot Parent]

Occasionally someone at my place of business somehow manages to send an email out to everyone in the department, or division, or even the whole company. Even on modern hardware the network will struggle if you send an email out to several hundreds or even thousands of recipients.

I'm going to take a guess here that your place of business has its spam filter configured to run on each mail delivery, and on internal -> internal emails.

Oops.

Re:Tales of old.

[stewbacca]

This is slashdot. The UI is never wrong. It's always the user's fault.

Re:Tales of old.

[stewbacca]

I'm pretty sure there are entire tomes of email etiquette books that universally advise against the use of "reply all".

Re:Tales of old.

[Rhaban]

Please stop woooshing to all.

Re:Tales of old.

[Belial6]

If I am reading your post correctly, that doesn't help if it isn't a mailing list. So, it wouldn't help if three people are taking part in a discussion via direct email.

How about having a limit of something like 5 or 10 addresses, and if it goes over that, all of the addresses get moved to the BCC field. This way, there are no extra steps for the user, the Reply To All will only get used for small groups since there won't be any large groups in the To field for ReplyToAll to reply to, and all email gets sent as expected. This would give the added bonus of keeping inconsiderate mail users from sending our email addresses out to everyone on their mailing list.

This could easily be implemented on the server to get the ball rolling and to deal with email clients that don't behave, and could be implemented on the clients as they get updated to improve the user experience by notifying them that the To field is being moved to the BCC.

Re:Tales of old.

[Hotawa Hawk-eye]

My take on this is that if you don't Reply All but forget to send the message to someone, it's easy enough to forward the message to that person.

If you do Reply All and send the message to someone to whom it shouldn't have been sent, it's much less easy to "unsend" the message to that person.

Re:Tales of old.

[Sylak]

But then it's difficult when you say "Please hit reply-all" to an e-mail with less tech savvy-people

Re:Tales of old.

[mcrbids]

Personally, my favorite is to hit reply-all, pointing out the stupidity of putting everybody on the "to:" line, and instructing original sender to use BCC so that inanities like somebody hitting "reply-all" could torture everybody with something stupid, followed by a rant explaining how everybody receiving this message will SOON BE INUNDATED BY SPAM if ANY of the 4,000 recipients has been infected with a virus, which is most assuredly the case, so everybody knows who to thank for their new, unlimited supply of p3n1Z piL1z spam!

Re:Tales of old.

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect they don't generally say "don't use reply all", but rather stuff like "don't use reply all to send email to people who won't care".

So [citation needed].

Re:Tales of old.

[Chris Mattern]

As reply-all is something that should only rarely be used,

Actually, I probably use it more than reply. It's very common in my workplace for four or five people to be involved in a email discussion, and people use reply-all to keep everybody aware of what's being said.

Re:Tales of old.

[TheThiefMaster]

We had a global-accessible share on the school server. All the school PCs had the VBScript interpreter enabled. I wrote a program that would constantly read a file (based on username) off the server, and display its contents. Another script could append to someone else's file. A chat program, basically. Based around *constant* network disk access.

The network was down for a week, the server had to be replaced. I got in trouble. On the plus side, the punishment basically involved working with the new IT guy to catalogue all the PCs round the school, and I got to play with the old server (which wasn't stable, the disks were fucked).

And I still got an E in A-Level IT.

Re:Tales of old.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thankfully with Gmail this is less annoying as all 40+ of those are kept in one conversation, but getting that conversation to die is annoying (mute doesn't seem to work as well as advertised).

Re:Tales of old.

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked for a company with over 5000 employees. A man in one section of a department was retiring, and two other ladies in the department wanted to send out an email (with fancy graphics) for a retirement party for this man. They knew that a number of people from each department knew this man (and he was high enough up so that they wouldn't likely get in trouble) so the sent this 100k graphic to everyone in the company. Now its a problem of the stupid email system. If an email has more than 2k of data, then store it on the server ONCE, and send notices to every inbox with a link to the email. That would be a smart email system. The company I worked for had a stupid email system. 5000 employees x 100k of data means 500000k of new data in the global inbox. Now-a-days that only half a gigabyte of data, chump change. But then (about 1996), it was more than the system could handle, and it started to choke. It brought the email system down for about a day and a half. Administrators were busy for the next week cleaning up the mess. They were politely asked not to try it again. I don't know if they ever got a better email system (a smarter one), but one can hope.

Re:Tales of old.

[tompaulco]

I almost exclusively use "reply all" unless it was a one on one e-mail. About 99% of the time, the people that were originally included on the e-mail that I got also are the exact same ones that need to be aware of the response to that e-mail. In fact, sometimes I add another person to the list, for example if my boss should be aware and is not on the list.
In fact, the ONLY instance in which I would NOT use Reply All is if it was a distribution list, and again, for the distribution lists we have set up in my company, 99% of the time, all of the people on that list do need to be on that reply.
And as far as accidentally ranting to Reply All, well, I do that on purpose, and I will even add people to the list.

Re:Tales of old.

[Anonymous Coward]

GMail's mute only works when your name isn't in the "to" line - it's meant to be used in conjunction with an actual distribution list or with CC, with the idea that if a mail really requires your attention, someone can put you in the "to" field to indicate that a message is for YOUR attention, and not just sent to you as a courtesy.

Of course, when people can't be bothered to use CC and BCC properly, or even to know what they mean, that becomes equally useless...

Re:Tales of old.

[Anonymous Coward]

I like it even more when the dipshit who sent the original mail has a 1.2 MB signature image.

Re:Tales of old.

[Anonymous Coward]

But why (and it's a big why) should you cc your boss at all? Let's assume you're an intelligent adult, capable of doing the job he was assigned to do. If that is so, then why do you (and millions of other people) send their boss a CC of all their mail? Does your boss really read all that mail? Does he act on it? If so, then it's blatant abuse of the CC field.

CC's should only be used if you deem the information relevant to someone else without expecting action from that same person. It's not, I repeat NOT, a cover-my-ass insurance nor a look-how-busy-i-am communicator.

I hate it when I receive mail that's only relevant to me, but still has 10 people in the CC, just so the sender can show off he send a mail.

Re:Tales of old.

[suso]

This was a long time ago. In old English the To: header line was actually spelled Two:

Re:Tales of old.

[hobarrera]

I used reply-all 99% of the time at my former job. It was a 15-people company, and most of the e-mails where organization-wide discussion or news which needed replies to go to all. I only used "forward" about 5 times in the last year, but I'd never say it shouldn't be where it is, right next to the "reply to all" (or reply to list) button.

Re:Tales of old.

[hobarrera]

An even mayor problem is that "huge and popular servers" (gmail) reject mail from someone else when it's got a HUGE amount of BCC as an "anti-spam policy", so we can't use BCC. BCC should be used more, but that doesn't mean CC shouldn't be used.

Re:Tales of old.

[Qzukk]

Some people who do use BCC sometimes don't know exactly how it works. Like the one time I received an email from an attorney To: their client and apparently BCC: everyone else. Whoever sent it probably heard that it was important to use BCC so that nobody gets to see anyone else's email addresses, but didn't realize that instead of sending an email To: each person individually, it sends the email with the original To: address to every person.

Which honestly, doesn't make sense. Even if you think of secretaries of days gone by, they'd have put the carbon copy into an envelope and addressed it to the person that copy should be sent to. Then again, it does makes sense once you realize that "To" is not the field used to identify who should receive the email.

Re:Tales of old.

[Anonymous Coward]

And as far as accidentally ranting to Reply All, well, I do that on purpose, and I will even add people to the list.

I suspect that most people who use reply to all for the same reason so many people get on Facebook. It's more about telling everyone your great thoughts than anything else.

Re:Tales of old.

[hawguy]

I very often need to have 2-3 people in the loop in addition to myself, I use "Reply to all" all the time. The problem is when you are on a huge mailing list like "Everyone in the company" and people use reply to all.

The solution to that is to limit who can send email to that "Everyone in the company" mailling list - often, only a few users need to be able to send mail to those huge mailing lists, no need to open it up to everyone in the company.

Re:Tales of old.

[similar_name]

People should have common sense "does everyone need to know my response?" It's as simple as that.

People think everybody needs to know what they had for dinner. Hence, the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and Reply all.

Re:Tales of old.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not sure why I am getting these messages. Please remove me from your distribution.

Re:Tales of old.

[geminidomino]

Nah, he's probably right. Most sets of 'rules of X etiquette' seems to start out as a general set of rules for not acting like a dickhole, but invariably, it then swell up into a Lovecraftian monstrosity of self-righteous dogma.

Re:Tales of old.

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to understand that mistakes can and do happen, and it's a very simple UI fix to prevent. As a single reply, which excludes most people in the discussion, is something that should only rarely be used, it shouldn't be as easy to click as the reply all button, something that is probably used 99% of the time instead of single-reply, that's simply poor user interface design to do so. There is no need to have one rarely needed button with possibly serious consequences (excluding one's boss, colleagues not receiving information) directly adjacent to the more benign button that most people intend to click anyway.

Don't assume that the way you use email is the way everyone else uses it. For me and everyone I know, for example, emails are usually discussions between small groups of people, rather than announcements, and everyone needs to receive all of the emails; accidentally using a single reply would be an insult to the people who didn't receive the email, and would result in them not knowing what was going on.

Re:Tales of old.

[SleazyRidr]

When you reply all to these types of messages, that just clogs up the system further! Please stop doing that!

Re:Tales of old.

[Quirkz]

Of course. This was back in the days when signals were sent from lookout to lookout by lighting signal fires. You used two logs to denote the original message, then threw on a third log is you wanted to send the message in another direction. Hence the Two: line for your first recipient and a Carbon Copy (because you mostly end up with carbon after burning the logs) when you sent it to a second recipient.

Re:Tales of old.

[gorzek]

FYI, the "unsubscribe" button isn't working and I'm still getting these messages.

Re:Tales of old.

[gorzek]

Same here. For various kinds of recordkeeping I have to "Reply All" many times a day. A lot of people have to be kept in the loop.

Re:Tales of old.

[Anonymous Coward]

As simple as email is, training is a huge issue. Back in 2000 working for a Fortune 300 company, some enterprising EVP got one of those "Bill Gates will send you $10 for everyone you forward this to" emails. She decides there's no need to be greedy, so she only selects GAL entries A through C...in a 44,000 person company.

Needless to say, nearly 5000 emails went out to over 100 different sites/exchange servers around the world...and of course within 30 seconds there were at least 40 "hey this is a hoax" or "hey this isn't appropriate" reply-alls. 9 hours later things were (mostly) back to normal. Needless to say IT was severely bitched at for not being able to "handle" the resultant email storm, and Stupid Bitch is still there as an EVP to this day.

Never did hear if her $50k check came through from Microsoft.

Re:Tales of old.

[mattack2]

One time back in the 90s at Indiana University when people were mostly still using pine, a secretary at the College of Arts and Sciences sent out an email to several thousand students and put all their addresses in the two line.

Did this really change in later pine/alpine development? Currently, when I respond to a message in alpine (1.00, not the current version), it asks:

Reply to all recipients?

and if I reply to a message with Reply-To: set, it asks whether I want to send to the originator or the Reply-To address.

(For most mailing list replies, I manually set Reply-To back to the list, or for personal replies back to me, to mostly alleviate the problem.. Once in a while, people insist on putting both me and the list back in, but that's rare since it involves more work on their end.)

Re:Tales of old.

[ShakaUVM]

>>There is no need to have one rarely needed button with possibly serious consequences directly adjacent to the more benign button that most people intend to click anyway.

Reply-all is very useful. When I work on projects with 5 or 6 people, we tend to all reply-all to each other, and gmail/hotmail handles it just fine.

It's just replying to 50+ people that's problematic, and as TFA says, it's probably best to enable warnings before sending something out to that many people. Though I've occasionally had to do it, too.

Re:Tales of old.

[SoftwareArtist]

I use "reply all" much more than reply. I can't count how many times an email conversation has gotten messed up because someone accidentally hit "reply" instead of "reply all", causing their response to be sent only to whoever happened to have written the most recent message in the thread. Then they wondered why everyone was ignoring them. Or maybe they thought they had taken care of their responsibilities ("I don't have time to do X right now. Bill, can you take care of it? Thanks!"), but Bill never saw their message and so a very important task was missed. I definitely want the UI to nudge people toward "reply all", not "reply".

Re:Tales of old.

[jrumney]

Those huge and popular servers do not discriminate between Bcc, Cc or To. If the mail is going to too many users on their server (because they can't see who on other servers it is going to until later in the spam processing process) they will reject it before it is sent.

Re:Tales of old.

[omglolbah]

*cough*

Net send is hilarious.

Our section of Norway (called a "Fylke", we're split into 19 of the buggers) Rogaland went to a citrix solution for all high schools.
Quite a few thousand users at the same time :p

Net send was enabled on the cluster......
Passwords were all numeric 9 digits, and they were generated in 30 address batches. No class has 30 students, max is really 27 or so... so 3 usernames at LEAST per class were "blank" in taht we could get hold of the password and use it for anon access *inno*

Bat file: :teehee
net send * CHEEEESE!
goto teehee

Start on the cluster, kill the citrix app (leaving the bat file running, as only a proper logoff would kill apps)...

The whole fecking cluster went down... We assumed it would spam a bit, but not that it would bring the whole thing down :p

They removed net send *cough*

Re:Tales of old.

[tompaulco]

That might be true in the general case. But in my case, I just want to make sure everyone who was on the question is also on the answer. As evidence for this, I have no facebook account, nor mySpace.

Re:Tales of old.

[mjwx]

I like the solution in K-9 Mail (android app) better.

The on screen menu has 'reply', you actually have to tap another button to get to 'reply-all'. It can be tedious, but it has prevented the reply-all issues in my case.

The Gmail application has had that functionality for some time now. Reply All is hidden (can be shown by pressing the arrow button that displays more buttons) and the only visible button is Reply. Once you're writing the reply you can choose between Reply, Reply All and Forward via a selection list via a selection list.

I blame outlook for not making reply the default and adding a reply all button next to the reply button.

Re:Tales of old.

[Karl Cocknozzle]

I sometimes find it annoying when people refuse to use Reply-All in the situations that it is appropriate to. For example, if four people need an answer to the same question, I might copy them on the message I send to somebody else. In that situation a "Reply-All" can be appropriate, especially if the body of my message indicates the question is on behalf of the people asking.

Re:Tales of old.

[mjwx]

Of course, after a dozen or so of those go out, you end up with two or three people sending a Reply All just to say "please stop sending your removal requests Reply All" The last one went out to 500 employees and I ended up with 40+ copies of the email in my inbox because of people being absolutely stupid.

There is a simple solution to this. All email clients need to be configured to pop up a warning dialog box if they are reply all to more then 50 people, it should say something like "you are replying to more then 50 people, are you sure you need to send this message to all of them". If the user clicks yes, machine gun armed drones will be dispatched to their cubicle.

Re:Tales of old.

[scurvyj]

Best one I personally ever did was accidentally include the wrong distribution list in Lotus when I was working for the National Australlia Bank. Somebody kept grabbing our CD marker pens (and they were spensy back in them days), so I sent out a request that they be returned.

The response that made my day was "Ok mate I'll take a look, but you realize I'm in Hong Kong."

Re:Tales of old.

[ieatcookies]

90% of my replying at work is replyall. When you work collaboratively with many people, replyall is a one click convenience.

Re:Tales of old.

[dwarfsoft]

My personal favourite on top of that is when you hit an Autoreply shitstorm as the email was sent to the entire company and x% of employees were on leave and had an Out of Office Autoreply which Replied to All (for some reason). Even though Groupwise (Glad I don't have to use that anymore, although I now have to use Notes.. yuk) is supposed to stop a autoreply storm it usually manages to fire off a half a dozen of them per person before it kicks in... This leads to lots of full inboxes.

Re:Tales of old.

[Meski]

if you find yourself talking to a team regularly, set up some email groups. It's a way around the reply all, and lf I add one person to a reply that you *don't* want the reply from you to go to, you just got bitten.

Re:Tales of old.

[st0nes]

I love to 'reply to all' when some idiot sends out a chain letter. Pointing out what a moron he is to his entire contact list goes some way towards discouraging him from doing it again.

Re:Tales of old.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because then he is in a better position to take action if you get hit by a bus?

Re:Tales of old.

[Anonymous Coward]

Spot on - someone mod this up. I use reply-all almost exclusively, with "to" recipient(s) being those who are required to action/own the message and "cc" recipients being "FYI". Dropping the "FYI" list would be disastrous, as in large teams, many people need to remain "in the loop".

Re:Tales of old.

[georgesdev]

A colleague did something similar:
He created an email account named something like to-all-customers. He then created an email group called to-all-customers too, and put the 10 000 email addresses of our customers in it.
Then from the to-all-customers account he sent an email to the to-all-customers group.
Of the 10 000 customers a few did a reply, and it started the most furious email storm the company had seen. Customers did not need to even use reply-all for the fun to continue!
10 days later that colleague got transferred to a job without customer contact, and I got his job. That was 13 years ago, I still giggle when I think about it!

Re:Tales of old.

[Neil Boekend]

IMHO there are a few options better than the current default (in all email programs and webmail clients I have seen):

1. Restore the button with a configuration setting
2. Make the user click "reply" first and then show the "reply all" button
3. Warn the user he has replied to all and ask for confirmation

The irrevocable removal of the reply all button isn't one of them.

Re:Tales of old.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not have a "Send to mailing list" button? What the hell is a blind carbon copy anyway?

Re:Tales of old.

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to understand that mistakes can and do happen, and it's a very simple UI fix to prevent. As reply-all is something that should only rarely be used, it shouldn't be as easy to click as the single reply button, something that is probably used 99% of the time instead of reply-all, that's simply poor user interface design to do so. There is no need to have one rarely needed button with possibly serious consequences directly adjacent to the more benign button that most people intend to click anyway.

If "BCC" can be hidden why not "Reply All"?

Leave Reply All along

[Lord Grey]

Just think of it as an opportunity for Darwinism.

Re:Leave Reply All along

[Anonymous Coward]

Just think of it as an opportunity for Darwinism.

Yeah, yeah, yeah - only stupid people do this - right.

When you've been working hard, crunch time, 12+ hour days and longer, you're tired, a little loopy, concentrating on something that just isn't going your way and all of a sudden, you get one of those emails addressed to the whole crew. It's something not that important but someone decides that now is a good time and it's that you respond to just the get the fucker out of the way so you can go back to getting your work done and on time - something probably from HR about benefits or whatever that HAS to be decided NOW because THEY think it's important or because they've procrastinated with some "team" building mumbo jumbo horseshit.

So, you bring up "Thunderbird" and with blurry eyes click on the first "Reply" button you see - they ARE right next to each other - and compose your email. It's late, you're tired, and this email is just yet another not-so-important distraction in your work life. You fire it off and maybe with a little snarky comment about how you're under a crunch period and don't they realize it and couldn't they just fucking wait another goddamn week?!

Ta-da! You just made a corporate faux-pas that will result in a weeks worth of "sensitivity" training from 9 to 5 and then from 5 to 11 every night getting your shit done.

Re:Leave Reply All along

[hedwards]

It has its uses. I've been using it more in the last week than probably the rest of my life combined. I've been doing group work over email with a small handful of people and reply all is a god send for that. The big problem is that there isn't typically a sanity check for when the list of addresses grows longer or a message asking if you really want to send it to everybody. Plus the buttons are often times right next to each other meaning that you can easily click the wrong one if you're not careful.

Re:Leave Reply All along

[idontgno]

That's like arguing we should be attracting dinosaur-killer meteor strikes to weed out the weak and unfit. A reply-all storm that size obliterates communication for the affected infrastructure for days. That's followed up by a fair bit of forensics, trying to backtrack the crapstorm to its initiating email, THEN followed by executing the guilty. Or not. If it's an executive secretary, it's probably just a mild talking-to.

OTOH, I've forgotten how many lulz there are to be had trolling in such a mailstorm, if you can get away with it.

Oh, BTW, epic fail DHS, but good work flushing out the Iranian spy*. Not that he was that good of a spy; if surreptitiously monitoring a DHS email list is equivalent to the Monty Python "How Not to be Seen sketch, asking the group "'Is this being a joke?" while signing your email with your real-world credentials ("Amir Ferdosi Sazeman-e Sana'et-e Defa' Qom Iran") is the same as the guy at the beginning of the aforementioned sketch who stands up from behind cover when asked to (and gets shot).

*Yeah, I know, he's probably not really a spy. But seriously, Homeland Security, why are you letting foreign nationals from adversary nations subscribe to your email lists? WTF?

Re:Leave Reply All along

[Anonymous Coward]

Leave it along?

Do you ever feel like your life is a game of blind man's bluff?

Re:Leave Reply All along

[khallow]

So what happens if a friend and my boss are next to each other on my cell phone? That mean you call the wrong at the middle of the night one too?

Yes.

So what happens if a friend and my boss are next to each other on my cell phone? That mean you call the wrong at the middle of the night one too?

Yes.

Bad UI design means it happens whether the excuse is "really crappy" or not. People who think as you do, just haven't yet been burned badly by bad UIs. When it happens to you, you'll get clued in fast as to why "Pay attention to what you do" is really crappy UI design.

Re:Leave Reply All along

[Anonymous Coward]

Just think of it as an opportunity for Darwinism.

Yeah, yeah, yeah - only stupid people do this - right.

Darwinism doesn't select for intelligence. Just survival. Inattentive smart people might be more harmful to the species than careful dumb people.

Re:Leave Reply All along

[TimmyDee]

OTOH, I've forgotten how many lulz there are to be had trolling in such a mailstorm, if you can get away with it.

Perhaps you mean "mailstrom"? *ducks*

Re:Leave Reply All along

[sexconker]

Bad UI design means it happens whether the excuse is "really crappy" or not. People who think as you do, just haven't yet been burned badly by bad UIs. When it happens to you, you'll get clued in fast as to why "Pay attention to what you do" is really crappy UI design.

Unless the UI is functionally broken, or shortcuts change with no notice, you have no excuse.

Pay attention to what you're doing. This goes for sending emails, using guns, driving cars, etc.
But your Honor! The gas pedal is RIGHT NEXT to the brake! I was coming home after working for 12+ hours! That's a FLAWED DESIGN!!

If you fuck up, it's on you. The whole "I CAN'T be wrong! It's everything else!" mentality is horseshit. This line of "thinking" is what got people to claim that 1 KB should mean 1000 B, and that using 1024 was somehow "wrong". No, shitface, if you're not paying attention to WHAT YOU'RE DOING (dealing with binary data), then it's your fault. KB has always meant 1024 B, and it always will. And there's a damned good reason for it (bits are logical units we count, not measure, and we care about the possible permutations of a certain number of bits for storage and bus width, thus, we use a base 2 exponential).
  K is not a magical, sacred symbol. Neither is M. (Does it mean meters? Minutes? A mass constant? Millions? Thousandths?). Even if it was a sacred symbol, and even if we excused the ambiguity the sacred symbol already has, and even if SI had some sort of jurisdiction, the symbol in question is not K, it is KB. The B is either right fucking next to it, or known from context.

I guarantee some electrical engineer DONE FUCKED UP one day, and then, instead of admitting that he doesn't know shit about computers, was lazy, wasn't paying attention, etc., he went for the easy "But K means 1000! It's the LAW!!" horse shit. The hard drive marketers know KB = 1024 B. They just chose to lie.

Bottom line: Pay attention. Own up to your mistakes. Ignorance is not an excuse, and neither is laziness, forgetfulness, etc. While UIs can and should be improved, and tailored to specific users' preferences, operating the UI incorrectly will always be user error. A functionally broken UI (pressing one button, getting a different result) is not user error, but it is NOT what we are talking about.

Re:Leave Reply All along

[magarity]

Darwinism doesn't select for intelligence. Just survival.

Darwinism doesn't select for survival per se; Darwinism is about adaptability in order to enable survival.

Re:Leave Reply All along

[hobarrera]

The pedal example is the best, and unarguable! However, I disagree with the K idea. K = Kilo = 1000. It's a pretty old unit of measure, everyone learns at school, and define by the SI, which is adopted by all except 2 countries. Next thing you know, a DOZEN bytes will be 10, and everyone should accept that. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units. Unless you live in USA o Burma, it's what you see in school. Disk manufacturers respect the International System of Units. All the rest tried to adapt it to their need instead of using a different unit for a different amout. K = 1000 If 1KB = 1024B then 1*(1000)B = 1024B 1000=1024 Clearly, they're not the same.

Re:Leave Reply All along

[jbengt]

Actually, "k" is the SI prefix for one thousand, not "K".

Re:Leave Reply All along

[lgw]

But your Honor! The gas pedal is RIGHT NEXT to the brake! I was coming home after working for 12+ hours! That's a FLAWED DESIGN!!

Audi settled millions of dollars in lawsuits, and their reputation suffered for a decade, because people who couldn't tell the gas pedal from the brake pedal were (sucessfully) blaming Audi for their operator errors. Toyota settled millions of dollars in lawsuits, and their reputation is still suffering, because people who couldn't tell the gas pedal from the brake pedal were (sucessfully) blaming Toyota for their operator errors. In old-style American cars, the barke pedal is far from the gas pedal and has a very different shape and feel - and they never had this problem.

If your product isn't designed for the convenience of stupid users, you have a niche, enthusiast product. Maybe you're OK with that. Maybe you'd rather have money.

Re:Leave Reply All along

[Kalriath]

No one's taking those egotistical self-aggrandizing whack-jobs seriously so long as their decreed replacement for the commonly accepted KILOBYTE (1024 bytes) sounds like something my cat vomited up.

This has never been confusing before now, up until fucking Apple decided to decree that hard drive manufacturer kilobytes are the real ones.

maybe reply-all should automatically be bcc?

[Marrow]

At least that way the email addresses do not get spammed to everyone. Or maybe that should be an additional dialog:
Do you want everyone to see all email addressees, do you want to hide email addresses with bcc, or do you want to cancel.

Re:maybe reply-all should automatically be bcc?

[ByOhTek]

There are plenty of cases where that is bad - collaboration via email, it support with multiple groups, etc. I prefer options that require an extra bit of effort for the reply all, that usually works well enough.

Re:maybe reply-all should automatically be bcc?

[hobarrera]

Any user that currently uses "reply to all" without paying attention will just hit ENTER if you add that dialogue.

Re:maybe reply-all should automatically be bcc?

[Peeteriz]

Reply-all should reply to all - but in many cases, the initial e-mail should contain addresses in bcc; so that any reply-all would reply only to the sender.

In normal usage, when a message is sent to 2-3-5-7 persons for discussion, any replies *should* go out to all of them by default, I've often seen people accidentally reply to sender only and then having to re-send the message to others.

Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

[H0p313ss]

So don't do that.

Corollary: Fire the ones who do it more than once.

Re:Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

[dkleinsc]

Devil's advocate: Software should make it hard to do stupid or dangerous things without really intending to.

That said, I find it to be an annoying tool more than anything else, because it makes it far far too easy to have lots of people hear discussions that really only need to involve 2 of people on the email. People don't seem to notice that the cost of CC'ing 10 people is as much as 2 minutes per person per email.

Re:Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

[hedwards]

No, and that's probably my biggest complaint about Windows. The engineers are telling me what I should be able to do, rather than making me raise my privileges to do whatever dangerous things I want to do. Admittedly that has changed and I believe that they finally got it more or less right with 7, but even up to about Vista they still hadn't gotten it right. And up to XP it was nigh impossible to get work done without being an admin account or doing some serious haxxoring of the system.

Something like UAC is probably about as good as it gets. The main problem they had with UAC was a lack of discrimination in what should warrant user intervention, but the idea itself has worked well for many years in other OSes. Personally, I prefer a well set up *BSD or similar box where a lot of that is handled with groups and group permissions rather than handing out root control of the entire box.

Re:Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

[bigstrat2003]

I disagree. The level of difficulty is high enough: you have to make a specific effort to click reply-all instead of reply. If people are too lazy or stupid to put a few seconds' thought into it, that is their fault, not the UI's fault. There's no reason to penalize the people who will want to legitimately use reply-all (by making them expend extra effort) just for the failures of a few.

Re:Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

[dwillden]

Reply all is great when organizing some family activity. Rather than make sure you remembered to include everyone in your reply, you just hit reply all and everybody gets the email. There is a reason Reply all exists. Perhaps the real issue isn't reply all but rather people doing massive corporate emails using cc: instead of bcc: which prevents the reply all fiasco. But then again wasn't there a /. article not that long ago claiming that bcc: was dead and useless? Death of BCC

So first we have a discussion about how bcc is dead and useless, and now we have a discussion about the supposed risks of "reply all," which risks would be substantially reduced through the use of bcc.

Re:Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

[hobarrera]

Software is a tool to be used by humans, not something to do it's job and human just turn knobs.

Re:Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

[hobarrera]

I agree. Don't make people-who-read pay just because they're a minority.

Re:Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

[Mike Mentalist]

I disagree. The level of difficulty is high enough: you have to make a specific effort to click reply-all instead of reply.

That 'specific effort' is exactly the same as hitting the reply button.

If people are too lazy or stupid to put a few seconds' thought into it, that is their fault, not the UI's fault.

*sigh* Yes, of course, anyone who makes a simple mistake like hitting the almost-the-same-button-as-they-meant-to-press-that-is-right-next-to-it is obviously stupid or lazy. It couldn't possibly be that they just made a mistake and so they have to be punished a la Darth 'You have failed me for the last time' Vader.

Re:Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

[lgw]

I'll make my product for stupid, lazy users. You make yours for smart users who always pay attentionand never make mistakes. Let's see who makes more money, in a culture where reality TV is a huge commercial success.

Re:Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Devil's advocate: Software should make it hard to do stupid or dangerous things without really intending to.

Yep. I worked on a system for an industrial motion control system inspecting rocket engines. The software would give you a list of points to 'go to' in sequence, and by default filled them all in with zeros, aka the home position.

These operators are carefully(?) steering the scanner around the back of this $5M rocket cone, and one of them cheerfully clicks on the line below the last entry line of carefully entered points. The machine obediently heads for home at full jog speed... Straight through this hideously expensive widget.

Fortunately, there was a another chap just idly leaning on the machine watching, and he knew enough to see that move start off in a very bad direction, and was fast enough to wallop an "emergency stop" button, saving everyone's bacon that day.

We got to lecture them on careful operation, but many other things were included in an emergency revision: Proximity sensors on the scanner head, software fixes to make that "not happen" (hehe), etc.

I felt a major problem with it was that it was running under Windows (the software, anyhow. The actual motion control was done in custom hardware) and it had all been built with the "Windows paradigm". To the operators it looked like Microsoft Word, and as a result they treated it like Word, in that most blunders are easily undone with Ctrl-Z. But when you're throwing around several million bucks worth of equipment, you can't "undo" a serious blunder when it makes things that shouldn't blunder into each other.

Anyhow... AC.

Re:Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is sufficiently hard as it is. The user has to click on "Reply All" then write their reply and then click "Send", if they are too dense to realise they clicked "Reply All" instead of "Reply" between clicking it and clicking "Send" then that is the user's fault.

Why do we even have that lever?

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand that reply all has a use case, but when I think the times I've legitimately used reply all are just about equal to the times I've accidentally used it. Can anyone tell me why reply all should have equal weight to reply, instead of being hidden in a menu somewhere?

Re:Why do we even have that lever?

[medlefsen]

Do you use email as part of your job? I am always a part of at least a dozen or so email conversations between groups of people. Reply-All is my default since I usually want to be talking to everyone in the conversation.

Re:Why do we even have that lever?

[hedwards]

Hidden isn't necessary, but it should come with a pop up asking if you're sure you want to reply all. Also the button shouldn't be right next to the reply button. As somebody else mentioned you don't have to hide the thing you can require an additional click to use it so that somebody is less likely to accidentally click on it when the mean to click reply.

Re:Why do we even have that lever?

[zzatz]

The confirmation should include the number of destinations. That's one extra click and a little reading to reply to the reasonable number people involved with a project, and one extra cancel button click when you realize that replying to everyone in the company isn't what you meant to do.

Re:Why do we even have that lever?

[Jezral]

Agreed. I also have Reply All as default, for the same reasons.

It's just easier, plus it makes you more aware in the rare cases when you don't want to Reply All.

I think Reply All is very useful

[C_amiga_fan]

Like if I'm sending "free books" or whatever to friends, I just click reply-all on an older email, trim out the 2-3 non relevant persons, and send off the email to all ~50 friends.

I've been fortunate never to have a "reply all" mistake at work or other embarrassing place. If anything I tend to hit "reply" by mistake, when I meant to include "all" the participants.

Re:I think Reply All is very useful

[Marc_Hawke]

"If anything I tend to hit "reply" by mistake, when I meant to include "all" the participants."

This is me. Every time I've ever hit 'Reply All' it was immediately preceeded by clicking 'Reply' and shouting 'D'oh!'

Re:I think Reply All is very useful

[data2]

Please stop doing this. Hitting reply-all on old emails destroys threading on pretty much all clients that support it. Your email client might have an address book and groups as an alternative.

Re:I think Reply All is very useful

[C_amiga_fan]

>>>Hitting reply-all on old emails destroys threading on pretty much all clients that support it.

(1) Don't care because it saves me typing ~50 emails.
(2) Not if you change the subject. Then it starts a new thread.

Re:I think Reply All is very useful

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a friend who would do this but also leave the old emails intact.

We'd all get a reply to a long thread (with the same subject) and the text:

"hey, does anyone want to hang out this weekend?"

Re:I think Reply All is very useful

[cras]

>>>Hitting reply-all on old emails destroys threading on pretty much all clients that support it.

(1) Don't care because it saves me typing ~50 emails.
(2) Not if you change the subject. Then it starts a new thread.

No it doesn't. If you hit reply button, it adds In-Reply-To: and/or References: headers, so your new message will still show up as belonging to an old thread. Changing the subject doesn't change this in any email clients I know of.

Re:I think Reply All is very useful

[praxis]

Um, no. Threads are determined by other headers, not the subject, in any client worth their salt. Just because Outlook threads by subject, doesn't make it proper.

Re:I think Reply All is very useful

[colinnwn]

(1) You're not doing it right. You don't need to type 50 emails. You start 1 new message, and manually add the 50 recipients if you want to do it the hard way. Or create an email group of the 50 recipients and add only that group. Many email clients allow you to expand the group and delete individual recipients after that.

(2) Depends on how the email client handles threading. From experience, some will, some won't. Gmail will even occasionally start a new thread when nothing has been changed and it should have been part of a previous thread.

Re:I think Reply All is very useful

[LanMan04]

Proper? Sounds like IMproper behavior to me, seeing as there's no reason to count an email as part of the same thread once the subject has changed (substantially, not just the addition of a few RE:RE:RE:).

Either that or there should be an option to "break thread".

Re:I think Reply All is very useful

[Kaz Kylheku]

You don't have a clue.

Re:I think Reply All is very useful

[praxis]

For better usability, the subject of the message should be just that, the subject of the message, not a thread title. A thread is a tree of messages which were replied, or referenced to another message in the thread. The fact that message X is a reply to or reference to message Y should determine inclusion in the thread, not the subject of that particular message.

Yes, in a perfect world, topics and threads would be 1:1, but the way humans communicate, they are not. For example, one topic might lead to the other. For context, having a thread of the progression of the conversation is useful, but one can also add upon that a subject to each individual message. That way, you get the best of both systems of organizing messages. The email headers already support that. There's a subject header, and there's a reference header, they do different things.

That way, if I am looking for information about A, I can search my mail, find messages with A in the subject and read those. I don't particularly care that those messages about A came from a dozen messages about B, but with threading I can read the context of how A came to be talked about if I wanted.

Re:I think Reply All is very useful

[praxis]

Sorry about the double post, I forgot to mention there is a message to break thread. It's done by not setting the reference header. Your mail user agent documentation should provide instructions on how to do that.

Re:I think Reply All is very useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Please stop doing this. Hitting reply-all on old emails destroys threading on pretty much all clients that support it.

Only if you use the same subject line.

Re:I think Reply All is very useful

[LordLucless]

Who would have thought hacking threading on top of a threadless protocol might not work perfectly? Your problem, not the senders

Re:I think Reply All is very useful

[izomiac]

Don't care because it saves me typing ~50 emails.

Why should someone bother reading your e-mail if you're unwilling to spend five seconds typing their e-mail address?

OTOH, I'm please to hear that someone takes time to not send e-mails to people that are unrelated. At my institution an e-mail gets sent to under ~5 people or to everybody. Nobody has quite made the connection that few people read their e-mail often since we get so much junk, and wasting 30 seconds of 600 people's time is worse than ten minutes of their own. Even worse, we get tons of research surveys that follow that stupid, "send it three times for optimal response rates" doctrine.

Re:I think Reply All is very useful

[demongp]

Which clients are those? Outlook 2010 seems to handle it fine?

Duh?

[shawnhcorey]

Just make the "Reply" button bigger than the rest, and the "Reply all" smaller. Then separate them so they're not side by side.

Re:Duh?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

One could also set a threshold(either just a number of addresses or, in places with more sophisticated metadata available, number of different departments, etc.) beyond which the Reply All requires an extra step to activate.

The exact parameters would obviously depend on the user and use case; but it generally seems to be the case that the more users that "reply all" would imply the less likely it is that you actually mean to hit "reply all".

Senders could also do their bit by using the BCC field, rather than having a combined TO and CC field consisting of several hundreds or thousands of addresses...

On the other side of the coin...

[JW CS]

I usually have the opposite problem. I want to reply to everyone included on the email, but I forget to hit reply all. I need to have an option to have the computer ask me what I intended to do every time I reply to an email with multiple recipients. It would be annoying, but that's the price I pay for my absent-mindedness.

Let it be.

[lwsimon]

Let it be, guys.

This is nothing more than social Darwinism. If you're dumb enough not only to send a nasty email, but to hit reply-all, you deserve what you get.

Re:Bedlam DL3

[Anonymous Coward]

Me Too!

Reply all for vendors who can't figure out BCC

[wheeda]

I love the reply all button. When vendors send advertising to everyone without out using BCC, I reply all. The vendors usually stop doing that. I've even replied all with contact information for competitors.

Mainly an Outlook problem.

[__aazsst3756]

My Yahoo mail account does not even have a dominant Reply All button, you have to use a pull down to use it. Seems a small interface change on Microsoft's part could make this a non issue.

Re:Mainly an Outlook problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are 2 buttons to control it. People just mash whatever to get done what they want.

Also it is not 'mainly' an outlook problem. I have over the years used several dozen email programs. It is an organizational problem. One organization *NO* one would reply all. As reply all with that origination meant the whole company of 20k. Different organization and everyone does reply all. Everyone needs to know what is going on. It creates a very spamy environment. The admins set the rules. No admins no rules...

Re:Mainly an Outlook problem.

[KingAlanI]

Yeah, in GMail it's in the dropdown menu under the arrow next to the regular reply button. (used it intentionally when communicating with group project teams)
In the Zimbra implementation I'm looking at, it's right between Reply and Forward, but anyway, Reply All never cropped up as a problem for me anyway, sending or receiving.

Re:Mainly an Outlook problem.

[hobarrera]

Why do you say on microsoft's part? Hotmail, I belive, has a very small amount of users compared to yahoo and gmail.

Default Reply All

[Anonymous Coward]

I've trained myself for years on Gmail with my default reply all button. I always know my email is going out to everybody.

What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't RTFA. Someone did something stupid, and wants a technological measure enacted to stop them from being stupid?

Can they just keep this feature in Windows Mail + Outlook please?

Easy fix

[countertrolling]

Make it so it asks you at least twice

Are you sure? Yes

Positive? Yes

Really? Yes!

Really really? Godammit!

Last chance... AAARGH!!

Okay, here goes... Make it stop!

Too late...

Re:Easy fix

[HTH NE1]

As you indicate, that just trains people to click through them all.

Instead, your mail program should be able to learn what e-mail aliases you're in by checking the To and Cc headers against your actual address. The more mails you get addressed not explicitly to you, the more likely the address they are addressed to is a list (usually the To address rather than a Cc). Thus, whenever you do a Reply All, it uses the learned weights of addresses to present you with a list of the recipients with any aliases presented more prominently.

Alternatively, since Bcc can skew the data, you could train the mailer with the known bulk remailer addresses in your organization. The mailer could also be trained to track the history of a conversation and flag it when a reply to your mistress will instead go to your wife or other crossing of social sets (sending corporate secret communications to a Yu Gi Oh mailing list).

By restricting the prompts to only those situations where there is a statistical likelihood that the message is misaddressed, you reduce the likelihood the user will blindly click through the alerts while preventing communications from going astray.

Re:Easy fix

[onemorechip]

How about a CAPTCHA for Reply-All? That would certainly stop the autopilots.

Re:Easy fix

[HTH NE1]

Solving the CAPTCHA doesn't make you think about the reason for the prompt.

Now if they had to retype the e-mail addresses the system thinks are unintended, that could be the potato we need.

And of course Facebook says fuck you

[alex_guy_CA]

The only reply in Facebook is "Reply all." You can't escape.

Bastards.

Re:And of course Facebook says fuck you

[Anonymous Coward]

No it isn't. You just didn't look hard enough.

Re:And of course Facebook says fuck you

[g253]

Not true. The default is reply to all, but there's a tiny "Reply" link next to each message, which allows you to reply just to the sender.

Re:And of course Facebook says fuck you

[egranlund]

oh god, how I hate this.

Nothing worse than someone sending a mass "Hey are you going to this!" message. The ensuing excuses why some random person I don't know or care about can't go to the party makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Worst part is I get the message on my BlackBerry and when I log into facebook -.-

Re:And of course Facebook says fuck you

[ronobot]

Psst: that's not actually true... It's not well implemented, but you *can* reply to an individual in a thread. Have you never gotten a message that said it had "branched off" of a separate thread?

Maybe...

[chemicaldave]

Maybe the dumbfuck to sends the mass emails in the first place should learn to BCC

The worst I've seen

[GC]

Our CEO at a company I used to work for sent out an all-employee mail detailing a salary freeze for all employees and voluntary redundancies. Moments later the CFO sent out an email to his accounts team detailing that their pay-rise would not be affected and that they should not consider redundancy... needless to say, the hapless git hit reply-all...

Simple Interface Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

This could be solve with a number of very simple interface design solutions... you know... like not putting the reply all button right beside the reply button.

Or putting the reply all button on the right side of the tool bar and the reply button on the left.

I'm sure someone could come up with thousands of ways that don't require a lot of actual effort in implementation.

Re:Bedlam DL3

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow... that URL wasn't focus group tested beforehand. I read that as MS sex change team. Hmm... not I'll think of that every time I read about Microsoft Exchange. msexchange: It'll cut your dick off!

News for nerds?

[pep939]

In nearly a decade at The Wall Street Journal, Bonds columnist Elizabeth Bernstein has covered education, philanthropy, psychology and religion - all areas in which personal relationships loom large. [...]

Somehow, I really don't think this article should be on slashdot...

The reply-all function might be a problem for your daily office employee, but c'mon, have you ever read an article that said "Hey people, guess what, when you type rm -rf / it deletes everything! Imagine the consequences..." ?
I mean, it clearly says "REPLY ALL" on the button, that's: 1. reply 2. to all ...

In my opinion, the problem is more a lack of knowing how to use the tool, rather than the tool itself. You'd be surprised how many people who work with computers every day don't know how to handle very basic functionality, let alone what every button on their screen actually does.

Re:News for nerds?

[causality]

You'd be surprised how many people who work with computers every day don't know how to handle very basic functionality

No ... no I really wouldn't.

I simply can't name any tool or machine or piece of equipment I use on a daily basis about which I remain so ignorant. Yet for average PC users this is the norm.

I could understand if you almost never had to use something. Maybe you use it once or twice a year so you're out-of-practice and have understandable difficulty remembering how everything is used. But to use something every day for hours a day and still not understand the most basic easy-to-understand functions that do not remotely require an expert to utilize ... without even accidentally picking up on bits of information here and there ... that takes work.

Lots of work, a natural curiosity and sense of wonder that was destroyed during childhood by the school system, a refusal to appreciate that literacy is a precious gift, and a resentment towards the notion that a little knowledge makes it much easier to operate a highly complex general-purpose machine. That's what it takes to maintain a status I call "permanent newbie".

Not a technical issue

[Anonymous Coward]

If people are firing off "rants" they don't want other people to see, then they shouldn't be writing the rant. It's a fairy simple rule most people ignore, "Don't write it down if you don't want people to read it."

Re:Not a technical issue

[ruben.gutierrez]

I can't believe it took this long for somebody to say this. Maybe I missed an earlier one. But, this is the first one I found. Everyone else is blaming UI design and lack of sleep. No people! Stop ranting on your work e-mail system!!! Sorry, no mod points here.

Microcharging?

[AlecC]

It would all be solved if we could microcharge for email. At $0.001 per email, no sensible use of email would build up a significant cost, even for the very poor. But if your message to the whole company cost $5, you might think twice. And the spam industry, of course, would become much less viable. I don't know how you could do it safely, reliably, unfraudably, but it would be nice to try.

Re:Microcharging?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think this would really solve the problem unless it was enacted by companies themselves as an internal policy. Nobody would accept being charged to send email that only uses their internally managed devices.

Re:Microcharging?

[hobarrera]

I'd never trade MY freedom to send e-mails in exchange to avoid people making STUPID mistakes, sorry, that's just WRONG. I don't care if it's just $1 in a lifetime, it's a matter of principle.

Re:Microcharging?

[nitehawk214]

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( x ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( x ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( x ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( x ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( x ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( x ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( x ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( x ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( x ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( x ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( x ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( x ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( x ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( x ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Re:Microcharging?

[Hotawa Hawk-eye]

How much do you think such a proposal would cost, say, Bruce Schneier when he sends out his Crypto-Gram newsletter to people that have requested it?

Or how about the Linux Kernel Mailing List?

Or the messages Slashdot can send you when someone replies to or moderates your comment? [See the Account link at the top of the screen.]

($0.001 per email) * (many many emails to which the recipient has opted-in) = a lot of money for list owners to pay.

I don't want to see the mailing lists I like all go behind paywalls or stop sending out messages entirely.

Low tech equivalents

[RogueyWon]

"Reply to all" is great for career-imperilling fun, but you can replicate the effect perfectly well with good old dead tree and snail-mail. Indeed, the closest thing I've had to a genuinely career-ending moment so far happened during my first year in work and was entirely down to a dead tree circulation mistake. Even now I still look back on it and cringe, even though I've since changed employers.

I needed to send two documents to different recipients in the (large) organisation I worked in, both of whom were based in different buildings in different parts of London. One was a routine, dull minute of a meeting. The other was a sensitive personnel-related document (relating to a staff disciplinary matter - I was in HR at the time). I decided to deal with the former first. I printed it out, put it in an envelope and put it in the out-tray for our internal delivery service (which had multiple collections daily and moved dead tree around our sites within about 30-60 minutes, depending on traffic). I then went back to find a secure mail pouch for the the personnel letter - only to find that the piece of paper I still had on my desk was the meeting minute. I look around and see the delivery guy vanishing into the lift with all of the internal mail.

Cue a 30 minute dash (and I do mean dash - literally running) across central London to beat the delivery van to our other site and intercept the envelope before the addressee could open it. I made it - by the skin of my teeth. Had I failed to, my career could have... well... turned out very differently - and not in a good sense. In a way, it was a good learning experience - I've been incredibly careful about what I put into envelopes ever since.

But it just goes to show that you don't need fancy new-fangled modern technology in order to ruin your career with a mis-addressed mail.

Re:Low tech equivalents

[hedwards]

Just imagine the LULZ that could be had by replacing the reply button in Outlook with a reply all button but keeping the original icon. Or by switching the two.

Re:Low tech equivalents

[hobarrera]

"But what if the printer had a dialogue indicating that you've got the wrong envelope, or warned you when you..."

This analogy is perfect, I can only image people trying to argue with it senselessly :-)

Re:Low tech equivalents

[DerekLyons]

But it just goes to show that you don't need fancy new-fangled modern technology in order to ruin your career with a mis-addressed mail.

Yep. I saw a guys naval career nearly end over a similar mistake - when we were doing some testing on sea trials a contractor needed to see a certain (unclassified) document, instead he was given the Secret version which he accidentally put in his brief case and took home... Fortunately the document was recovered, so the guy who made the mistake of handing over the wrong document was only busted in rank rather than tossed in the brig and then tossed out of the Navy.
 
The guy who ended up in the brig and then out on the street was the guy who tossed a Top Secret custody-controlled document in the trash, and put a plain old unclassified routine instruction back into the folder and back into the safe. (The mistake wasn't discovered for two days, until someone needed that Top Secret document from the safe...) You don't need new-fangled modern technology to ruin your career by 'deleting' the wrong thing.
 
Then there was the friend of mine who lost both copies of his thesis (the typed original and the carbon) because somebody stole his car with the briefcase containing both copies in the back seat... Stupidity in handling important data/documents goes back a long ways.

Re:Low tech equivalents

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I fail to hit reply all when I should much, much more often than I hit reply all when I should not.

Slashvertisement

[rogueippacket]

I work in an organization with 32 000+ employees. There is only one "Reply All" storm per year, and it's usually the fault of the sender for not using BCC in a distribution email. If this is a common thing at your workplace, you need email etiquette training or your mail admins need to get off their asses and properly administer distribution lists. Or even better, delegate the ability to manage the dist lists to group managers.
This is nothing more than an advertisement for a new AOL "feature".

Re:Slashvertisement

[Code Master]

Did the latest email storm have a recipe for banana bread in it? If so, we work for the same company!

too tech savvy?

[bhcompy]

'After almost two decades of constant, grinding email use, we should all be too tech-savvy to keep making the same mortifying mistake, too careful to keep putting our relationships and careers on the line because of sloppiness.'

If Lamar Odom can still make bonehead mistakes and pass it to the opposition a few times a year after playing basketball for 20+ years, some schlub in an office can still mistakenly hit Reply All.

The horrors that can be

[hilldog]

Ah yes I remember years back getting an inter-office memo from a director telling us of a visit by the new VP of the company. I stupidly thinking I was just replying to a few co-workers sent back 'I'm so happy I'm popping a woody'. Imagine my chagrin at finding out the VP was part of the reply all and BCC to boot. Couple years later I got promoted and the VP jokingly mentioned the 'woody' statement so guess it did not hurt.

Easy in Thunderbird to fix

[satch89450]

After reading a couple of standard SlashDot "shoulda do this" comments, I pulled up my mail program, Thunderbird, and customized my toolbar so that "reply all" is to the right of the Thunderbird "search" bar. Far away from "reply". 15 seconds to do, 10 seconds to check that it was "sticky."

Stop bellyaching. Start fixing.

Oh, way, this is SlashDot...

Re:Easy in Thunderbird to fix

[Code Master]

I think the problem occurs when your muscle memory kicks in and automatically chooses one option or the other. If you never use reply all, then errors would be proximity based one. But if you do use reply all frequently, then the errors are due to conditioning which will not be solved by where your buttons are.

Re:Easy in Thunderbird to fix

[Anonymous Coward]

Toolbar? Using toolbars requires taking your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. Real geeks use keyboard shortcuts (or at the very least the context menu spawned by the menu key on modern keyboards).

For that matter, my Thunderbird only has 4 buttons on the toolbar: Get Mail, Write, Address Book, and Tag. The context-specific buttons appear in the header area of the message in question.

Re:Easy in Thunderbird to fix

[hedwards]

Some clients also allow you to delay the actual sending of the email for a few moments so you can pull it back if you notice an obvious mistake just after clicking send.

Re:Easy in Thunderbird to fix

[smellsofbikes]

Thanks for the suggestion: I just did the same. I've never had a 'reply all' disaster and I'd like to keep it that way.

Re:Easy in Thunderbird to fix

[Anonymous Coward]

There are still about a billion devices out there that are not fixed

Don't use company email for personal conversations

[eepok]

I keep my business-related conversations to my dept. account. I keep my university conversations to my university account. I keep my personal conversations in my gmail account or through instant messengers.

Keep the spheres separate and life will be easier.

really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it really that hard to hit "reply" instead of "reply all"?

Is it really that easy to confuse the two, or mash the wrong button, that this is a common problem?

Sure, I've heard the horror stories... And everyone makes a mistake now and then... But is it really so common that we're looking to redesign software?

I've been stuck using Outlook at work for years now... And I've got two buttons - reply and reply all - right next to eachother. I've never hit the wrong button.

Computers never make mistakes

[ItsLenny]

...only people make mistakes. The simple answer is sllloooowww down, take a breath then hit reply (or reply all if applicable). Yes, I've hit the wrong button by mistake in my life, but that doesn't mean that we need to hide the reply all button or even pop up a window that makes me have to click twice to reply all. Thats just plain inconvenient. To those saying it's a outlook problem no it's not. I use Mac Mail on my Mac and thunderbird on my Linux systems and they both have reply and reply all right next to each other. I assume outlook is the same (I haven't used it in about 5 years). However at the end of the day the error isn't the program it's the user that clicks the wrong button probably because you're in too much of a hurry. No e-mail is THAT urgent take a deep breath and relax... think about what you're clicking and everything will be ok.

And all the non tech people will hate it

[Original Buddha]

Been there. Done that. At my previous company we removed the Reply All from the Notes template and made people take another step to get to it. It did achieve it's main goal of reducing the amount of mail sent but it also generated thousands of calls to the help desk. Non techies hate when something is changed. Highly paid non techies think it's their duty to complain constantly about minor changes.

Re:Bedlam DL3

[fishbowl]

I had to stop reading with Osterman's comment: "But even though Exchange is a REALLY good email system..."

yet another bad idea from aol

[jsepeta]

I wonder how long it would take your mail to download if there were 100 faces in the message. WHAT A BAD IDEA. thanks, AOL.

Re:yet another bad idea from aol

[Anonymous Coward]

You are one of those who jumps and berates the idea before understanding it... aren't you?

Assume that anything you write will be read

[Anonymous Coward]

by your worst enemy, then forwarded with commentary to your spouse, your parents, and your boss.

pop-up warning box listing all recipients

[peter303]

You make that the default to Reply-All.

So disable the "Reply to All" button...

[Mr_Silver]

Open Outlook, load up the Visual Basic Editor and put this into a new module:

Public Sub ToggleReplyToAll()
ActiveInspector.CurrentItem.Actions("Reply to All") = Not ActiveInspector.CurrentItem.Actions("Reply to All")
End Sub

Then open an email and add a button pointing to that macro. After that, if you want to disable "Reply to All" then press the button. To re-enable, press it again.

Note! Only works on emails sent within same organisation. Only works on emails read on Microsoft Outlook. "Reply to All" is still enabled on other email clients (such as their Blackberry or OWA). Can be circumvented with a little VBA knowledge - however this will be beyond most people. Not completely foolproof, but will stop a lot of people.

Re:So disable the "Reply to All" button...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can also disable the button by editing the group policies. This doesn't disable the function - you can still reply all with Ctrl+Shift+R, but will prevent accidental mouse clicks. The following works on Outlook 2003, but I think you can download templates for any version (search MS's download site).

1) Download the "ADM, OPAs, and Explain Text Update" (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=BA8BC720-EDC2-479B-B115-5ABB70B3F490&displaylang=en).
2) Extract the templates to a folder (e.g. C:\ORKSP3AT).
3) Open the Group Policy Editor (Start, Run..., gpedit.msc).
4) In the Group Policy Editor, right-click the Administrative Templates folder under User Configuration in the left hand pane, and choose Add/Remove Templates...
5) Click Add... then browse to the folder you just extracted the templates to, select outlk11.adm, and click on Open.
6) Close the Add/Remove Templates... window. There should now be a new folder, Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 under the Administrative Templates folder.
7) Under this new folder, select Disable items in user interface, then Custom.
8) In the right hand pane, Double click on Disable command bar and menu items.
9) Change the radio button selection from Not Configured to Enabled, which un-greys the Show... button below.
10) Click Show... then Add...
11) Enter "355" (without the quotes), click OK on all dialogs, and exit the Group Policy Editor.
12) Restart Outlook

Re:So disable the "Reply to All" button...

[calzones]

What are these "mouse-clicks" you speak of? ;)

I use Apple Mail and it's Command-Shift-R to reply all, or Command-R to just reply.

Never ever have made a mistake in which I actually wanted.

Only trouble with Reply-To munging on lists

[data2]

I have much more trouble (and have been burnt by) the reply-to munging on some e-mail lists. What it does is rewrite the Reply-to to the mailing list address instead of the original sender, so that people with semi-broken clients without reply-to-list feature can just hit reply-to instead of having to type in the address of the mailing list on a reply.

It's not cc:

[crackspackle]

It's cyb:

Maybe we should just

[geekoid]

become mature enough to stop pounding out angry rants?

I amost always use Reply All.

[Anonymous Coward]

I even use Reply All when replying to messages sent only to me. The only exception is when the sender is broadcasting a question to be potentially answered by everyone, where the answers are not mutually interesting or outright private. (In that case I will still use Reply All, but I've trained myself to look at the list of recipients in consideration of the nature of the reply and trim it).

Reply All is the default, correct reply command, and Reply is just for the above special case.

If you habitually use Reply, you will end up fragmenting discussions, by excluding people on the Cc: loop. Failing to keep people informed is a mistake almost as bad as sending to unintended recipients.

simple is better

[Anonymous Coward]

How about a simple counter on the send button or next to the TO: field?

FROM: Anonymous User
TO: (250 recipients) user1; user2;....user250

PEBCAK

[neurovish]

Or you could try not being an asshole at work and keeping all of your correspondence in line with how you should present yourself. It is not the software vendor's fault if you are a moron or never evolved socially past middle school.

Two different issues

[RapmasterT]

These are two different, and UNRELATED issues.

Accidental "reply all" is just that, an accident. Muscle memory, inattention, etc...it's going to happen for a variety of reasons. It could be handled as simply as a reply all having an extra "are you sure" dialog that includes a count of how many people will be receiving it.

reply all mailstorm is completely different...that is a result of INTENTIONAL behavior. people are INTENDING to reply to all, usually to show their idiocy by saying "stop replying to all". No amount of "are you sure" or other cute crap is going to stop people from intentionally, but inappropriately replying to all.

hopeless

[hb253]

Technology can't prevent stupidity. Either we remove the ability to reply all or we live with the consequences.

Re:Don't use company email for personal conversati

[geekoid]

true,and completely impractical.

Extended version of the "reply all" commercial...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's also an extended version of the Bridgestone commercial. Even better!

Burying "reply all" in the UI: big mistake.

[Kaz Kylheku]

The reply-all command is the main, default way of replying.

Reply-single is for the rare special case when a question is broadcast to a list of people, such that the answers are private or mutually uninteresting.

Reply-all is critically important for most e-mails involving multiple people, because without it, you fragment the discussion. You the end up with the "what, you didn't get the e-mail???" type situations.

More than 90% of all replies that I send on a daily basis require Reply-All, and I use it habitually even for e-mails sent only to me. Why would I want to hide this behind an extra menu, or otherwise make it harder to invoke?

The best practice is to hit Reply All and train yourself to double check the list of recipients in light of the nature of the reply. If anything, it's the Reply command that ought to be harder to invoke, or eliminated entirely.

How about just not writing such "rants"?

[John Hasler]

n/t

who doesn't use reply all?

[beattie]

I can't think of the last time I used "reply" over "reply all" when it was an email with multiple people. If it's a shitty broadcast email, delete. If it's a conversation with multiple people, I want to email them all. Just pay attention to who is in the to and cc fields if you are so sensitive.

Confirmation: to be or not to be?

[ausrob]

How about when hitting "reply all" the mail client pops up a message box confirming that the user wants to "reply all"? Question is.. Is the annoyance of a confirmation box worth it to avoid a career ending mistake or, at the least, a healthy dosage of WTF? Part of me prefers that the career equivalent of "social darwinism" kicks in to reward reply-all stupidity. Then again - haven't we all written heated emails when we've been tired at some point in our careers? Personally, to avoid such mistakes I have a rule - I don't write heated or rude emails in the mail client directly. I write them in notepad and when I've calmed down, I usually rethink the text and it never gets sent.

Hey theodp

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw your story submission to slashdot made the front page, good work. I don't think those idiots at slashdot will understand the article anyway and those stupid editors they have are create nothing more then monkey scribe.
I verified the kids will be at their grandparents this weekend so are you and wife still coming over Saturday night? Bring an inflatable intertube this time, that thing we used last weekend left marks on my wifes legs and the squeeking noises ruined the video.

Call me later.

It's a simple UI issue

[Rysc]

Don't make "Reply to all" easy to do or don't make it easy to mistake for "Reply", or both.

I would suggest that overloading the Reply button would be the best approach. It would behave much like the Firefox "back" button: Click to reply, click and hold for a menu that includes "reply to all." Yes it's a little slower if reply to all is common for you, but that's what toolbar customization is for. You certainly will make no more mistakes.

Alternatively, put "Reply to all" *FAR AWAY* from "Reply." Like on the right-hand side of the toolbar, where "Reply" would remain on the left. Simple, effective. I've no idea why these changes were not implemented years ago.

Re:It's a simple UI issue

[kthreadd]

One of the best implementations I've seen was the one that Mulberry did. It has a single Reply button which actually understands the fields in the message such as Reply-To, brings up a dialog where you select which ones you want to send to, cc and bcc, where the default values where taken from what the headers said in the message.

Ah for the good old days

[buckeyeguy]

when badly coded MTA software would get a reply-to-all with embedded email groups in it, misprocess the groups, and go into a exponentially-growing loop that brings down the server (happened in an office where I worked, Groupwise was the app). That'd show those reply-all types.

At my current job tho, people hate being left out of the loop, so reply-alls are the norm, rather than the exception. "Think before typing" hasn't been repealed, people just act like it has.

stupid noobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are we even having a discussion about "reply all"? Don't you know that is only available with AOL?

Who the fuck uses AOL? Only idiots that don't know how to use a computer.

Re: Inconsiderate (was "I think ReplyAll ...")

[value_added]

>>>Hitting reply-all on old emails destroys threading on pretty much all clients that support it.

(1) Don't care because it saves me typing ~50 emails.
(2) Not if you change the subject. Then it starts a new thread.

First, you may not care, but you're writing for the benefit of the addressee, not yourself.

Second, changing the Subject doesn't do squat, modulo what some email clients do with that change. Threading is based on the References header.

Third, your opinions are being posted to web forum. Is your use of email quote delimiters pulled out of the same bag of silly tricks, or haven't you figured out the HTML options offered by Slashdot?

Personally, I'm annoyed by lazy and inconsiderate people. I'm even more annoyed having to manually re-edit the message (break the thread), and invent a Subject line for the sender so I know WTF the email is really about. Why there's so many of you out there is anyone's guess.

I guess it happens...

[NitroWolf]

I mean, I guess it happens that people accidentally reply-all... but I've never done it and I've never been on the receiving end of it. I've been using email since the mid-80's from a personal standpoint and I've had a number of corporate email accounts, both large and small. I can't recall a single instance of this happening. The reply-all storms that I have experienced were clearly intentional, with the people doing the reply-all knowing full well that is what they were doing.

So I wonder if there really is a case of people "accidentally" hitting reply-all and not just *claiming* they accidentally did it when they do something stupid. I mean, shit, I'm sure it happens now and then, but is it really that big of a problem, this "accidental" reply-all? It sounds more like a problem of people using it inappropriately than of people using it accidentally. I know my experience is purely anecdotal, but you'd think if it were that widespread of a problem I'd have run across it at least once in the past 25 years.

Re:I guess it happens...

[Anonymous Coward]

It happens a lot. It's not a technical problem but usually the impact of emailing everyone some dirt accidentally usually makes it a very big deal when it does happen. I work at a law firm with about 2000 employees. I've seen it many times and some people have even got let go because of it and a lot more embarrased. We took some non technical measures to limit it. A group of select managers is now responsible to monitor, filter, and forward a few of our "all_XXX@company.com" distribution list email addresses.

onosecond

[ThatsNotPudding]

That all too brief time between your action and realization of said action.

Don't Assume Anything

[mjcb]

'After almost two decades of constant, grinding email use, we should all be too tech-savvy to keep making the same mortifying mistake, too careful to keep putting our relationships and careers on the line because of sloppiness.' Screw that. I had a user last week going crazy because she couldn't send an email to her boss. I was at home sick, so after talking to her on the phone for about 15 minutes and having her freak out because of it and having her boss yell at me to fix the issue, I crawled out of bed to log in remotely to her workstation. The "problem" was that instead of putting an email address in the To field, she opted to just write the name of her boss and ignored the error messages. If you can believe it, she wouldn't admit she was at fault and still said it was my problem.

Pop-Up Box

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to see the big email clients just put one extra step in when you hit "reply-all." There should be a box that pops up and says "You are about to send this email to 426 people. Are you sure you want to do this?"

OH! Even better, the pop-up should say "You are about to send this email to 426 email addresses including: . Are you sure you want to do this?" The have the same box pop up with the next 20 people on the list, etc, until all 426 people have been confirmed. It would be no hassle at all for the various legitimate uses of reply-all, and would serve as a major disincentive to participating in reply-all storms.

Reply All isn't a problem

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Reply All isn't a problem. As others have mentioned it bcc, how do we teach the ignorant MFs about bcc, perhaps bcc should be the default instead of to and cc?

MS Echange/Outlook and headers

[Anonymous Coward]

One step better.
Emails with Outlook and Exchange can be masked very easily. I'm sure there are clients that can do it but telneting to port 25 of your exchange box works as well.

RCPT TO: boss@company.com
FROM: Secretary
DATA:
Reply to: secretary, the

Hey, I'm in the back room waiting for you with a surprise ..

When the user hits reply in Outlook, it will show "Secretary, The" in the To: field but it will actually go to allbusiness instead which would only be known if you right clicked and looked at the properties in the to field.

E-mail advice for geeks like me

[__roo]

My life got a lot easier when I adopted the rule to never write anything in e-mail that I wouldn't want forwarded. Not only does it prevent the "reply all" problem, it also prevents the problem where the person I ranted to cc:'s the subject of the rant, either accidentally or as a way to stab me in the back.

Also, one thing I discovered is that while, as a geek, I chuckle when someone sends me an e-mail ranting about some idiot who deserves it, other (non-geek) people often feel uncomfortable when they see it. I think they now feel burdened with this new information that people that they work with aren't getting along, or something to that effect. My work life got easier when I stopped making the people around me feel uncomfortable, and I bet that my fellow socially awkward geeks would also see similar results.

Why does Microsoft...

[nowen2dot]

...have an mSexChangeTeam ? :-)

Re:Why does Microsoft...

[DMUTPeregrine]

They are an equal opportunity employer with an innovative approach to affirmative action.

Buttons? On a Toolbar?

[PhunkySchtuff]

I actually had to check in my mail client to see if the Reply and Reply All buttons are next to each other. They are, and I didn't even know it.

Who (at least of the Slashdot posing crowd) doesn't do the equivalent of Command+R for reply or Command+Shift+R for Reply All and leaves the toolbar buttons alone?

evolution must continue

[LodCrappo]

if we prevent the stupid from killing themselves we will never advance as a species, and will always have to deal with stupid people

Re:evolution must continue

[hb253]

Amen

Needed with micromanagers

[Anonymous Coward]

I am almost required to use this button at work. If not, I will get a lengthy discussion from my boss about keeping him in the loop. There is some serious butt hurt in the corporate world when people aren't informed about every minor detail of what you do.

Woops

[KahabutDieDrake]

I came here with the intent of saying that it's ridicules to be using TO or CC for long lists of people in the first place, so reply all is a non-issue. As it turns out, apparently, large portions of slashdot are spammers. I keep seeing things like "I use it to keep the team together" or "how else do you keep on top of a project?" and other similar sentiments. As a consultant, one of the first bits of training I give to companies is proper email formatting. And the first part of that is distribution lists, and then proper mass mailing formats. TO: YOURSELF : CC: THE BOSS BCC: EVERYONE ELSE.

I guess such wisdom falls on the deaf ears of the current generation of IT. After all, you guys are all too busy checking the 400 messages you receive a day. 98% of which aren't for you, or don't add anything useful. My current employer has this problem, he spends most of the day checking and replying to email. But he doesn't get paid for doing that, and neither do most of you.

I'm not saying that reply all and long lists of people aren't useful in some cases. They are. Essential in fact. SOMETIMES. Far more often you are wasting your time, and everyone else's. I would ask you to take an objective look at your inbox, and figure how much of that cruft is actually helpful, and how much of it you could get by without. Now consider how much more time each day you would have, if the only messages you got or sent were critical.

Email in the workplace has ballooned so badly that in some cases, I've actually recommended turning it off. I'm not talking about a 20 person office either, I'm talking about fortune 500 companies. I'm well aware that before email, it was phones. The difference being, in an office, being on the phone is obvious and what you are accomplishing is also obvious. If you are wasting time, your boss knows it, you know he knows it so it's a self limiting issue. With email, no one can tell the difference between typing an email with value, typing an email without value, or typing that TPS report you were supposed to have on my desk yesterday. I sent you a message about it, didn't you get it? FAR too many office workers spend FAR too much time trading email of little or no value what so ever. And don't even get me started on grammar, spelling, composition, or intelligent discourse.

A fun exercise, get your IT director, the highest level manager you can find, and someone from HR. Now, pull 10% of the days mail que down to a terminal, and sit down and review the contents. Have the IT guy obfuscate the TO: FROM: fields, and just look at what is written. I've never done this with anyone that didn't decide that email usage required some {more} training.

Obvious tech solution: perms on lists/aliases!

[Kaz Kylheku]

A big mailing list such as "everyone-seattle-office" should be access controlled so that only certain people can send to it. If you receive mail because you are on the "everyone-seattle-office" alias, and accidentally hit Reply All, the "everyone-seattle-office" list should bounce your response: "Oops, you don't have permission to send to the everyone-seattle-office alias".

Problem solved. The office secretary doesn't have to remember to use Reply-To: or Bcc:, and neither does anyone else have to remember to use Reply for that message rather than the usual Reply All.

I depend on reply all!

[CharlieHedlin]

There is nothing worse than technical discussion being fragmented when people forget to use reply all! If I don't want my recipients to interact with each other, I will use BCC.

Re:Don't use company email for personal conversati

[eepok]

Unfortunately, that's the nature of beast. If the issue is keeping things separate within a single system, then maybe you just need separate systems.

Remove the ability for the human to make the error.

And if so they're entire tomes of crock.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I'm pretty sure there are entire tomes of email etiquette books that universally advise against the use of "reply all".

And if so they're tomes full of something else as well.

"Reply All" allows the instant creation of a task-based "mailing list" in a business setting, without the overhead of setting up a mailing list and tearing it down after the task is done.

If the mail tools didn't have it, participations in a flash crew would require copying all the addresses every time. That's a job for a computer, not a busy worker with a mouse and incipient carpal tunnel syndrome. And accidentally dropping one address can not only disrupt the operation but offend the lost worker.

Imagine the effect on office productivity of doubling (or more) the time to communicate. It can dwarf the time spent in deleting the occasional emails from being improperly added to the Cc: list on mail exchanges that are one-shot or will peter out in short order.

Sure "Reply All" can cause problems. So can fire, or virtually any other powerful tool when improperly used.

Re:And if so they're entire tomes of crock.

[stewbacca]

I don't think anyone is advocating the removal of "reply all".

What I think people advocate (and email etiquette books advocate) is not automatically using re: all for every email...especially when only one person in the re: all list needs to get a response.

Funny you talk about productivity. A growing problem in professional environments is the loss of productivity due to too many emails. Not having to wade through and delete the hundred or so reply all emails a day I get would definitely increase my productivity.

Re:And if so they're entire tomes of crock.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I don't think anyone is advocating the removal of "reply all".

Really? I thought that was exactly what was being discussed.

What I think people advocate (and email etiquette books advocate) is not automatically using re: all for every email...especially when only one person in the re: all list needs to get a response.

I'm with you there.

A growing problem in professional environments is the loss of productivity due to too many emails. Not having to wade through and delete the hundred or so reply all emails a day I get would definitely increase my productivity.

I agree it's a problem - one I have, too. But at least in my case it's not a "reply all" issue. (Such reply explosions are a couple-times-a-year problem.)

The problem is departmental and project-wide mailing lists being used for things that should be discussed among a subset - for which "reply all" is the correct button to use.

Re:And if so they're entire tomes of crock.

[Carewolf]

I wouldn't even mention business. You could make a short-lived real mailing-list if you need to. It is much more useful in private, where everybody doesn't share the same email-system. Try to get a few close friends together, plan a party, or whatever, you send a mail to everybody involved in planing, everybody replies to everybody. This is the only really useful way to do informal private email discussions, of course this is only for less than 10 people, any more and reply-all goes to hell.

Re:And if so they're entire tomes of crock.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I wouldn't even mention business. You could make a short-lived real mailing-list if you need to.

Set up a short-lived real mailing list in a CORPORATION? It is to laugh. Hah!

I work at a major multinational communications equipment vendor. It's likely most of your internet packets go through more than one of our boxes during their travels. By the time a short-lived per-task mailing list could be set up the task would be over. And several others started and over sequentially.

Hell: A mail outage or other computer problem that doesn't (obviously to a front-line helpdesk attendant working for a service vendor and located on a different continent) affect whole departments goes in a queue where the IT department's target performance is 90% fixed within three days. Where it might wait for weeks.

And you don't need to tell me that it should be done differently. I've been fighting and losing that battle ever since we were acquired several years ago.

Re:And if so they're entire tomes of crock.

[stewbacca]

Sorry, but no. Nobody is talking about removing the reply all (or at least I don't see it here). What I do see are people who are advocating a better UI that makes reply all less likely to be pressed when not needed, and/or educating people about the appropriate times for using reply all.

Threading by reply

[Ungrounded Lightning]

... there's no reason to count an email as part of the same thread once the subject has changed ...

Sure there is.

The subject is often related to something at the start of the thread that becomes obsolete. Changing the subject when the actual subject of conversation changes keeps things sane - especially when something important comes up. (Example: A flash team debugging something and, after several iterations of "try this" "no that didn't work" something significant is discovered.)

Thread by Subject: (rather than References: and In-reply-to:) and a change of subject splits the flash team email into different parts of a crowded inbox. Oops! But don't change the subject and someone multiplexing among several teams may waste hours because the subject line didn't inform him that he needed to open the email and pay attention to the new development in THIS task NOW.

How hard would it be...

[The Great Pretender]

to move the reply all button to the other side of the screen. Most people hit reply all because they're too quickly trying to hit reply. Make folk look for the reply all and it'll cut down on a bunch of mistakes. Just a thought

Re:Don't use company email for personal conversati

[heypete]

Really? Doesn't seem that hard; I access my work/university mail (I work at a university) with Thunderbird, and use the web-based interface for my personal account open in a browser. Not impractical at all.

If I were inclined, I could access everything in Thunderbird, but I like keeping things separate and not storing personal mail on a work computer.

Google Wave

[Anonymous Coward]

I apologize if someone else posted this already, but didn't Google address this with Google Wave?

I know it did for everyone in my small office as well as among my friends and family. After about 1 month of using it, I knew few people who wanted to use email. It was nice being able to send out a message and all those people could elect to remain in the loop or opt out.

Mulberry does it right

[AnotherScratchMonkey]

It's amazing that no one's copied Mulberry's Reply dialog.

Re:Don't use company email for personal conversati

[eepok]

Yep. Outlook for business. Webmail clients (separate) for other accounts.

Covering my tracks

[Anonymous Coward]

At my first company I sent some silly reply to all that I didn't intend to. It wasn't to the entire company but some VPs were on the list. I was only an intern but had admin access to Exchange. So I logged in to Exchange and deleted the email from the mailbox of everyone who got it. The perfect crime.

Need more options...

[Anonymous Coward]

What if email applications, such as Outlook (Exchange), had an option to set a threshold? For instance, hitting reply all to a group of five works just like it does now. However, hitting reply all to a group of twenty or more would pop up a warning asking if you really want to reply to everyone. (There could be additional rules built in to recognize internal group lists and such as well.) If you try to reply all to more than, say, 50 (or 100...the numbers set would be up to the Administrator), it would grey out the button. Then, of course, you'd need to manage it at an organizational level using group policy or something equivalent, so it could be enforced across the organization.

Obviously, I have a specific scenario in mind, but the basic concept could be applied to any email system. *shrug*

The what button?

[Anonymous Coward]

I removed that from my Thunderbird toolbar years ago.

The real WTF is people using CC instead of BCC. When the sender is smart enough not to share his recipient list with every potential spammer out there, Reply All can't do any harm.

Or use a real mailing list. I know Mailman looks like Stallman's hairy anus, but it serves its purpose.

Another solution

[ashvagan]

How about making the To and From line RED or some striking color when a Reply All button is clicked. The user will get accustomed with this 'theme' and they will immediately realize that they may have hit the 'Reply All' button accidentally. It's not a NP hard problem I suppose. The companies I have worked for and the university I've studied at all have the policy against Reply All emails, specially when group aliases are included in the original emails.

Re:Don't use company email for personal conversati

[penguinchris]

I used a similar system in a university setting with 5 accounts in thunderbird. The problem I had was that thunderbird would seem to randomly decide which email address to use, even if I specified which I wanted to use. This resulted in work email and email to students coming from my personal accounts (e.g. penguinchris, which isn't too bad) and my "spam" account I use to sign up for things, which isn't really embarrassing or anything but it'd seem weird to most.

So, your solution of keeping personal stuff truly separate is important in those kinds of settings.

Of course, I was using my own laptop so it would have been annoying to not load my personal accounts into thunderbird, so what I should have done is use a different email program altogether for my work accounts.

Excuses

[haydensdaddy]

"I wonder if the Reply All problem would occur if you saw 100 faces in the email,' AOL's Bill Wetherell says."
I wonder what would happen if you started taking responsibility for your actions and start thinking before you do them...?